I took an expert to a STEM event. Here's what happened.

It had been described as “a week-long free schools event” put together in the hope that it “inspires S1-S3 pupils to pursue a STEM-based (science, technology, engineering and maths) career through hands-on activities and discussions with early-career STEM professionals.”

Founded in 1989, Edinburgh Science is a charity that is probably best known for running its annual science festival, but it also runs a touring education programme for schools called Generation Science. Those events, like the career’s hive, are carried out as part of the mission to “inspire, encourage and challenge people of all ages and backgrounds to explore and understand the world around them.”

The event took place inside the grand gallery of Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland (Image: Hope Holme) The main space of the careers hive was arranged into four different section, within which were a range of different activities designed to give kids a glimpse through one possible window into the world of STEM.

So alongside the long-term exhibits like the lighthouse lamp and the South Pacific feast bowl, I also saw a fully-featured dummy for practising keyhole surgery, a squad of robots that could be programmed to move using a tablet, an apparatus for holding people upside down, model satellites with interchangeable parts, and plenty more – all intended to be ice-breaker activities that would open up conversations between the young people and the STEM volunteer hosting the activity.

School groups who attended could also benefit from talks by people who – sometimes to their own surprise – are working in STEM-related jobs.

Emily Breedon has a degree in history and museum studies, but she is now the stakeholder engagement officer for a renewable energy partnership planning a massive offshore windfarm in the sea north of Fraserburgh. She points out that “when you think of STEM you think scientist, engineer…” but, as she proves, that’s far from the whole picture, and even a humanities graduate has been welcomed.

Abdurahman Khan is a BBC software engineering apprentice who works on “highly scalable cloud systems” that, in incredibly simple terms, allow us to listen to BBC content . He tells me that, at the end of school, he wanted to work while his mum wanted him to study, so this sort of graduate apprenticeship was the ideal compromise. He applied for lots of different types of opportunities with different organisations rather than just pinning his hopes on one specific route, and it seems to be paying off.

Pupils were able to explore a variety of hands-on, STEM-related exhibits (Image: Hope Holme) I was impressed by what I had seen during my visit but, as I left, I realised that I don’t necessarily have the right background to judge whether or not this sort of approach is likely to succeed.

And it’s not because of my limited understanding of the employment prospects of gall-bladder surgeons, or the fact that I don’t know how to explain the processes behind machine learning down to the ones and zeroes. It’s much more simple.

I’m too old.

I needed an expert, but not a doctor or a computer engineer or even an astronaut.

I needed a kid.

Fortunately, I’ve got one of those, so a couple of days later I was back on the train to Edinburgh – and this time my ten year old son was alongside me.

As soon as we walked in, he loved it.

I’ve got photos of him removing gallstones at the keyhole surgery exhibit, and excitedly discussing the optimal arrangement for a satellite with one of the volunteers. He learned about using light to detect sugar in blueberries – very useful if you only want to know when they’re ready to eat – and said that it was “amazing.”

When we reached the coding station, and I stared wide-eyed at the tablet screen, he just picked it up, flicked his finger around a few times, and then smiled as the robot in front of him started walking forwards. I managed to make it wave a little.

In short, we had a great time, but did my son go away thinking any more about all this stuff, or was it just a nice day out (which is fine, of course) that also included a look at the replica dinosaur skeleton and a wander through the deep space exhibit?

The activities were designed to spark conversations between young people and volunteers (Image: Hope Holme) Well, the next day he wanted to know the name of the one of the systems we’d seen in use – the Teachable Machine. This is a project from Google that allows users to train an AI to recognise images, sounds and gestures, and during the exhibition we’d seen it set up to recognise facial expressions. It was fairly successful, although it was adamant that my normal, resting expression makes me look angry, and I still feel slightly insulted.

For the next couple of hours we were experimenting with the different features, uploading images and recordings to test and refine the system, and even thinking about how it could be applied in the real world.

Will he go on to be an AI or machine-learning whizz when he grows up? Who knows.

But if the goal was to get kids excited about the possibilities offered by STEM, then the careers hub definitely hit the mark.

An expert told me so.